Wayne County is declared StormReady

WOOSTER — The National Weather Service has designated Wayne County a storm-ready county, the 30th of 88 counties in Ohio.

Director Joe Villegas and his team at the Wayne County Emergency Management Agency worked the last two years to qualify for the national program sponsored by the National Weather Service. The program is voluntary and the designation is only valid for two years before the EMA needs to complete recertification.

“It’s a program to ensure that your community has the tools in place to save lives and property from the weather,” said Gary Garnet, chief meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Cleveland. “It’s a great program because you can be assured that there are multiple things in place in this county to be weather prepared.”

Garnet and Christine Riley, a warning coordination meteorologist for NWS, presented the Wayne County EMA team with a certificate and StormReady sign at the Wayne County Commissioners meeting on Wednesday.

The Wayne County EMA organized preparedness actions for the community including the EMA providing early warnings, the dispatch centers receiving more timely weather reports and weather warnings, and notifying the public of incoming severe weather.

“We did this before, but this is much more streamlined,” Villegas said. “It’s pretty much up to the specifications of what the National Weather Service would like to see that we can do for our community.”

During the process, EMA Specialist James Howard also worked to secure weather radios for all the school districts and made sure the dispatch centers had different ways to receive weather reports. The City of Wooster got its own weather station so the EMA, located in the Wayne County Justice Center in Wooster, would have more accurate weather reports.

Villegas could not say whether the Storm Ready qualification would help when seeking grant funds, but he did expect a benefit for areas in the county participating in the National Flood Insurance Program and improving their community rating system (CRS).

“They can actually use that as a way to see if their insurance premiums can also go down,” Villegas said.

It could also help large manufacturing plants obtain devices that would trigger the county’s reverse notification system, allowing them to get their employees to shelter in the event of a tornado.

The commissioners also approved updates to the Wayne County Hazard Mitigation Plan, required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a condition to receive certain kinds of non-emergency disaster assistance including funding mitigation projects.

All of the cities and villages in the county participated in identifying the greatest hazard risks facing Wayne County. In the plan, the EMA had to identify the risks facing the county, the types of disasters that could occur from each risk, the categories of severity, the number of previous occurrences, the probability of future events and the loss estimation if such a disaster should occur.

Planner Barb Pittard identified floods and high-winds as “the biggies for Wayne County, but there’s also the potential for dam failures or landslides. It just depends where it is.”

Reporter Emily Morgan can be reached at 330-287-1632 or [email protected].

CREDIT: EMILY MORGAN